Background: Occupational exposure to hazardous drugs occurs in all aspects of anticancer drug handling. Proper recommendations and guidelines should be applied to control and reduce exposure. Objective: To assess pharmacists' knowledge and practice regarding the safe handling of anticancer drugs. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted at seven major hospitals in Baghdad City, Iraq, from December 2023 to February 2024. A pre-designed questionnaire was given to pharmacists who handled anticancer drugs in chemotherapy units. The questionnaire comprises sociodemographic data, knowledge of the safe handling of cytotoxic drugs and thoughts about exposure and risk, practices for safely handling cytotoxic drugs, and challenges for safely handling cytotoxic drugs. Results: A total of 126 pharmacists were enrolled in the study. Less than half of the participants (46%) received training on anticancer drugs. While more than a third (42.9%) of the pharmacists were handling more than 100 cytotoxic preparations weekly, the total knowledge score was 7.14, while the total practice score was 73.36, with less than half of the pharmacists having good knowledge (44.44%) or practice (48.41%). Pharmacists who received training had significantly higher total practice scores than those who did not. Pharmacists with more than 100 weekly preparations were more knowledgeable than those with 50–99 preparations. Conclusions: The majority of participating pharmacists had fair to excellent knowledge and practice regarding the safe handling of cytotoxic medications. However, there were some gaps regarding important knowledge and practice issues. To improve knowledge and practices regarding anticancer handling, training is necessary.
In this work, strains and dynamic crack growth were studied and analyzed in thin flat plate with a surface crack at the center, subjected to cycling low velocity impact loading for two types of aluminum plates (2024, 6061). Experimental and numerical methods were implemented to achieve this research. Numerical analysis using program (ANSYS11-APDL) based on finite element method used to analysis the strains with respect to time at crack tip and then find the velocity of the crack growth under cycling impact loading. In the experimental work, a rig was designed and manufactured to applying the cycling impact loading on the cracked specimens. The grid points was screened in front of the crack tip to measure the elastic-plas
... Show MoreSensing insole systems are a promising technology for various applications in healthcare and sports. They can provide valuable information about the foot pressure distribution and gait patterns of different individuals. However, designing and implementing such systems poses several challenges, such as sensor selection, calibration, data processing, and interpretation. This paper proposes a sensing insole system that uses force-sensitive resistors (FSRs) to measure the pressure exerted by the foot on different regions of the insole. This system classifies four types of foot deformities: normal, flat, over-pronation, and excessive supination. The classification stage uses the differential values of pressure points as input for a feedforwar
... Show MoreThe issue of penalized regression model has received considerable critical attention to variable selection. It plays an essential role in dealing with high dimensional data. Arctangent denoted by the Atan penalty has been used in both estimation and variable selection as an efficient method recently. However, the Atan penalty is very sensitive to outliers in response to variables or heavy-tailed error distribution. While the least absolute deviation is a good method to get robustness in regression estimation. The specific objective of this research is to propose a robust Atan estimator from combining these two ideas at once. Simulation experiments and real data applications show that the p
... Show MoreThe present study focused mainly on the buckling behavior of composite laminated plates subjected to mechanical loads. Mechanical loads are analyzed by experimental analysis, analytical analysis (for laminates without cutouts) and numerical analysis by finite element method (for laminates with and without cutouts) for different type of loads which could be uniform or non-uniform, uniaxial or biaxial. In addition to many design parameters of the laminates such as aspect ratio, thickness ratio, and lamination angle or the parameters of the cutout such as shape, size, position, direction, and radii rounding) which are changed to studytheir effects on the buckling characteristics with various boundary conditions. Levy method of classical lam
... Show MoreIn this paper, we calculate and measure the SNR theoretically and experimental for digital full duplex optical communication systems for different ranges in free space, the system consists of transmitter and receiver in each side. The semiconductor laser (pointer) was used as a carrier wave in free space with the specification is 5mW power and 650nm wavelength. The type of optical detector was used a PIN with area 1mm2 and responsively 0.4A/W for this wavelength. The results show a high quality optical communication system for different range from (300-1300)m with different bit rat (60-140)kbit/sec is achieved with best values of the signal to noise ratio (SNR).
In this work, the switching nonlinear dynamics of a Fabry-Perot etalon are studied. The method used to complete the solution of the differential equations for the nonlinear medium. The Debye relaxation equations solved numerically to predict the behavior of the cavity for modulated input power. The response of the cavity filled with materials of different response time is depicted. For a material with a response time equal to = 50 ns, the cavity switches after about (100 ns). Notice that there is always a finite time delay before the cavity switches. The switch up time is much longer than the cavity build-up time of the corresponding linear cavity which was found to be of the order of a few round-trip ti
... Show MoreAs one type of heating furnaces, the electric heating furnace (EHF) typically suffers from time delay, non-linearity, time-varying parameters, system uncertainties, and harsh en-vironment of the furnace, which significantly deteriorate the temperature control process of the EHF system. In order to achieve accurate and robust temperature tracking performance, an integration of robust state feedback control (RSFC) and a novel sliding mode-based disturbance observer (SMDO) is proposed in this paper, where modeling errors and external disturbances are lumped as a lumped disturbance. To describe the characteristics of the EHF, by using convection laws, an integrated dynamic model is established and identified as an uncertain nonlinear second ord
... Show More